The Story So Far
In my prior posts about power, I defined the term, discussed where it comes from (sticks and carrots), and looked at how side-taking determines where power lies.1 Where those posts giveth, this post in the Power series taketh away and explains how power is limited, making it hard to take over the whole world.
The Big Menu
Historically, some people have had a ton of power because of who they are, their identity. It was often very good to be the King. Whatever you said went. But in some places, you couldn’t just say whatever.
Let’s begin with the Magna Carta, a statement by Barons indicating that the powers of King John—and subsequent kings—were limited in certain respects.2 For example, the document guaranteed that no one—well, no “free man”—could be arbitrarily deprived of life, liberty, or property by the king, establishing what today we would call procedural justice rights.
Now, as we have seen, words themselves don’t circumscribe power. Writing some words down on a Big Charter does not force anyone to obey them. The law says you can’t jaywalk on the streets of Manhattan but, really, you can. So, when kings violated the terms of the document, doing what the document said they couldn’t do, the Barons needed to use force to make them pay for it, leading to the First and Second Barons’ War. The extent of the king’s actual power would be established through fights and other forms of negotiation for centuries, leading to the present moment, in which the English monarch’s power is highly circumscribed and largely ceremonial.
How can we understand this process in light of the prior discussion of power? Before the Magna Carta, the king had vast, nearly unlimited power due to the forces he could bring to bear—the beliefs in the heads of obedient soldiers, loyal members of the court, paid attendants, etc.—as well as the beliefs of others with coercive forces, including the nobility. In short, he was in an Identity-Focused Side-Taking regime. When conflicts occurred, observers used an identity strategy, supporting the king. However, once the barons agreed on the constraints to the king’s power and wrote them down, they specified the conditions under which they would all gang up against him. They said, hey, for most stuff, sure, we’ll side with the King. But, if the king takes these actions, then we will side against the king. They instituted the start of an Action-Focused Side-Taking system, saying, publicly, that they would use the action strategy for a certain set of actions.
This is a Big Deal, illustrating that just like power itself, limits on power lie in shared beliefs. On the particular day King John put his seal to the Magna Carta, there had been no armed conflict—those would come later—and no new armies were raised. The king’s power was limited because on that day, beliefs changed. The barons now had specific beliefs about when they would all join together in conflict against the King.
The Magna Carta served to coordinate the barons. It’s not enough for each person to have the belief. Coordination requires that people know that others share the belief—and know that others know that others share the belief—which is why documents are copied and distributed for all to see (and to see that everyone else sees). The Magna Carta, then, was a key step in the process of limiting the power of the monarch. Later developments would lead to additional documents and traditions, pressing royal power inward. English history—and Western history, more broadly—is an increasing commitment to action-based regimes. As people agreed to take sides based on actions rather than identities, people with favored identities lost aspects of their powers.3
Why did constraints on identity regime happen, historically, when they did? I leave this deep puzzle to those better versed in history.4 It is worth noting that coordination is facilitated by communications technologies, and it seems plausible that as these technologies improved—the printing press especially—coordination for this purpose was easier. My guess is that some historical progress in terms of implementing action-based regimes had to do with improved communication technologies. This idea might explain why modern dictatorships, holdouts of identity regimes, are fond of censorship.
The HR Manual is Like the Magna Carta
I’m going to skip over the American revolution, the Constitution, and lots of other changes downstream of the Magna Carta. A few people have written a little bit about these already.5
Instead, I’d like to address how the employee manual is like the Magna Carta.
In the era depicted in the series Mad Men, the 60s in the United States, the men at the top of firms like Sterling Cooper had considerable power. That is, they had various carrots (promotions, raises, perks) and sticks (the ability to fire, demote) that they could use to advance their own interests. They had this power because if conflicts arose about behavior in the workplace, people sided with them. This regime led to men with power doing the sort of things you might expect, including indulging racist or sexist preferences, hiring female employees based on their physical attractiveness (or quid pro quo) as depicted in the show, and so on. They had this power because few took the side of those who objected.
Mad Men holds its dramatic appeal in large part because it so aptly portrays a past which, in certain respects, has disappeared.
What changed?
Over time, power changed because action-focused regimes spread in the workplace: taking certain actions led to being on the losing side of conflicts. Some of this spread was required by federal, state, and local laws. That is, people with power carrots—promotions, etc.—and power sticks—firing, etc.—were required by statute to use carrots and sticks to advance the interests of the company, not themselves. If they used them to advance their own interests, then they would be sided against by HR, courts, and other people at the company.
So, sure, a manager still had the authority to hire, but if the manager used that carrot as a power carrot, in his own interests, then people harmed by that decision might well be able to gather sufficient support to best the manager. The regime had changed from one in which the manager had the power to a rule-based regime, in which an employee could, say, petition the Department of Human Resources and ask that they take their side in the dispute, based on the rule in the Employee Manual—or the law. Just as the Magna Carta made a public statement about when actions specified choosing sides for the king’s behavior, manuals and laws did the same for managers, circumscribing the power that they had because of the increasing range of actions that would lead the company—or the state—to side against them and with the employee.
This dynamic is the crux of changes in power. The list of cases in which actions are used to choose sides grows: here are the things you can’t do or we’ll all side against you. In short, people get power because sometimes people choose sides based on identity—the king before the Magna Carta, bosses before HR—but they lose power because of the range of actions that, if taken, will result in them being sided against. Their net power is the power they have because of who they are and their position minus the power they lack because of the range of actions which result in being sided against.
In the case of the English monarchy, the course of history squeezed the ruler’s power into a smaller and smaller circle: there were fewer and fewer actions they could take and be supported by all the relevant parties. Where once rex non potest peccare—the king can do no wrong—the monarch lost the power to influence national policy very much at all. Most of the monarch’s power sticks were taken away. This isn’t to say the monarch does not retain some power. There are ceremonial duties, a platform and, of course, big carrots, in the form of the riches still accorded to the throne. Having said that, King Charles III is not powerful in the way his namesake, Stuart King Charles, was—a man who could say with a straight face that he ruled under Divine Right, the ultimate identity-based regime.
Similarly, of course executives in advertising firms still have a certain amount of authority. However, how much power do they have? To what extent can they advance their personal interests? Of course they have authority to make key decisions for their companies. But they cannot advance their personal interests the way partners at Sterling Cooper could. Instead, to the extent that they have authority, they must use it for the apparent good of the company, not themselves. Like English kings, their power has been compressed. Yes, King Charles III has supreme authority to choose the decorations of Buckingham Palace. He cannot, however, declare war on the French and lay siege to Calais.
Changes in power come about in many different ways, not all of them written in declarations, manuals, or statutes. Consider cultures such as ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and Imperial China where fathers decided who their daughters would marry. In these cultures, the father’s husband-choosing power was enforced by side-taking: a woman who chose to mate with someone other than her father’s choice would be in big trouble. (Just ask Helen of Troy.) In these cultures, the father had a potentially valuable power carrot to dangle over others: exclusive sexual access to a young woman, namely his daughter.6 It should be clear that while the father has the power carrot, the carrot itself, as it were, does not.
This of course changed as women gained increasing control over their sexual decisions. Because sexual access is a big benefit to males, the ability to choose when and with whom to grant this benefit is a powerful carrot for women to wield. To this day, cultures differ in the extent to which access to a woman’s sexuality is understood to be within her control or her relatives’. The change in who has the power occurs whenever individuals gain the ability to choose the disposition of anything that was previously under others’ control because third parties will support the choice.
Context is King
Let’s end with a bit more from A Game of Thrones to illustrate another way in which power can be confusing: It is very easy to be misled into thinking that power lies where it has always lain. People get used to certain configurations and complexions of power and it is easy to overlook that as people’s beliefs change, the context for power changes, and the locus of power itself changes.
[BIG SPOILERS] In A Storm of Swords, the fraught relationship between Tyrion Lannister and his father, Tywin, comes to a head. Tywin despises Tyrion for being a dwarf and blames him for his mother's death in childbirth. Tyrion discovers that Tywin has been sleeping with his former lover and seeks out his father in the Tower of the Hand. He finds Tywin sitting on the privy, and after briefly airing his grievances, kills Tywin with a crossbow bolt.
To that point in the story, it is fair to say that, by and large, all of the power has been with Tywin. Indeed, Tyrion was in the midst of escaping from captivity, perhaps among the least powerful situations in which one can find oneself.
However, with no one else around, and with a loaded crossbow in his hands,7 Tyrion, in that setting in that moment, had the power and, indeed, was able to advance his interests.
Similarly, just because the English king and corporate CEOs have historically held power of one sort or another, that fact alone does not mean that they currently still do. As beliefs change about whether to use the identity strategy or the action strategy for various decisions, where actual, true power lies also changes.
The lesson from this is you cannot rely on knowing who had power yesterday to figure out who has power today. Power can change very quickly because people’s beliefs can change very quickly. Because contexts can change rapidly—a prisoner escapes with a loaded crossbow, an outrage reconfigures public sympathies—and beliefs can similarly change rapidly, power can change rapidly.
A great deal of history is about changes in power, often but not always moving from identity regimes, such as absolute monarchies, to action regimes, epitomized by the rule of law.
The distinction between identity regimes and action regimes is helpful for making sense of world history. The distinction is also useful for trying to circumvent the Iron Rule of Power and figure out exactly where power lies today, which is the topic of the next post in this series.
The Power Series
REFERENCES
Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Publishers.
DeScioli, P. (2023). On the origin of laws by natural selection. Evolution and Human Behavior, 44, 195-209. [link]
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.
Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Viking.
Pomeranz, K. (2000). The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton University Press.
Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The man who mistook his wife for a chattel. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 289-322). Oxford University Press.
It’s important to note that the limits on the King’s power were mostly relevant to what the King could do vis-à-vis barons. The Magna Carta was far from a general establishment of broad rights among the populace.
Some might not see the identity/action distinction to be the heart of the matter and explaining the arc of civilization is a complex matter. Reasonable people can disagree. Just one quick note on this. Some might say that it was the spread of the rule of law that was really the key. My reply to that is simply that the spread of action focused regimes just is the spread of the rule of law. Law is a quintessential action regime. The clearest exposition of this is DeScioli, 2023.
See, e.g., Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now for excellent treatments.
My favorite works on this are The Great Divergence and Why Nations Fail.
See Wilson & Daly, 1992.
The loaded part is not just for flair. A standard crossbow takes forever to load, so having a bolt ready to go is actually an important part of his formidability.
I think my AI art of this same scene is better https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/agency
So, then would twitter pile-ons be a return to identity-based side choosing?